La Cathédrale Engloutie

Location

Country: Holy See
City: Vatican City
Place: British Embassy

One of numerous studies for a group of paintings based on the theme of La Cathédrale Engloutie (‘The Sunken Cathedral’). Much of Richards’ best work was concerned with correspondences between painting and music and poetry.

This group of works, painted between 1958 and 1965, is based on responses to Claude Debussy’s prelude of the same name (1910). The prelude is based on the ancient Breton legend of the submerged Cathedral of Ys, disappearing and half-appearing as the sea rises and falls, its towers taking different forms, and the bells and organ creating different sounds with the interplay of wind and sea.

The Welsh poet Vernon Watkins wrote in 1964: ‘There is a bond between all the arts, and his response to music and poetry is an integral part of Ceri Richards’ painting. An accomplished musician himself, he has used the evocative qualities of Debussy’s music to create these marvellous designs. Their intensity exists on many levels. Art springs from conflict, and the conflict here is between two eternities, that of the sea assimilating all things into its movement towards ultimate oblivion and that of the cathedral embodying man’s faith and mind, sinking through time, only to re-assert its weight and magnetic force.’

Born in Dunvant, a mining village near Swansea, Ceri Richards studied at Swansea School of Art. In the early 1920s, he attended the Royal College of Art where he later taught, in addition to teaching at the Slade and Chelsea School of Art. He often returned to the Gower Peninsula in Wales, which inspired his work. Richards became Head of Painting at Cardiff School of Art during the Second World War. In 1961 he won a gold medal at the National Eisteddfod and in 1962, won the Einaudi Painting Prize at the Venice Biennale. A versatile artist, he made prints, collages, reliefs, costume designs and paintings. He was a Tate Trustee from 1958 to 1965, and received a CBE in 1961. After Richards’ death, major exhibitions of his work were held in Cardiff, Chichester and London.

Places

Subjects

abstract, cathedral

Materials & Techniques

paper (as artists material), watercolour (as artists materials), charcoal, chalk, watercolour (as object name), collage

Artist

Ceri Richards (1903 - 1971)

Title

La Cathédrale Engloutie

Date

1962

Medium

Watercolour, charcoal, chalk collage on paper

Dimensions

height: 40.50 cm, width: 34.50 cm

Acquisition

Purchased from Marlborough Fine Art, November 1965

Inscription

br: Ceri Richards 1962

GAC number

7266